John Steinbeck, The Art of Fiction

Editor’s note: John Steinbeck had agreed to a Paris Review inter-view late in his life. He had earlier been coy about it but then want-ed the interview very much. He was, unfortunately, too sick to work on the project, though it was at the end often in his thoughts. With this interest of his in mind, the editors of this magazine com-piled a number of comments on the art of fiction that John Steinbeck made over the years. Some come from the East of Eden diaries, published in December 1969 by Viking Press under the title Journal of a Novel. Others are excerpted from letters, some of which have been collected under the title Steinbeck: A Life in Letters and published in October 1975 by Viking. The quotes have been organized under various topic headings rather than chrono-logically, as they are in the diaries and letters. Nathaniel Benchley, a close friend of the author, has provided the introduction.

By rights this preface or introduction or whatever it is should be called “Compliments of a Friend,” because I have neither the per-spective nor the desire to offer up a critique of John Steinbeck’s writing even if anyone would listen. Furthermore, nobody has asked me to, so we’re all that much better off. I knew him, and I know a little bit of what he thought about writing, and that will be my contribution.
He once said that to write well about something you had to either love it or hate it very much, and that in a sense was a mir-ror of his own personality. Things were either black or white, and although he might change his basic position (as he eventually did about the Vietnam war), if you were on his side, you could do no wrong, and if you were agin him, you could do no right. It wasn’t as simplistic as that may make it sound, but there were very few gray areas where he was concerned. And when he wrote, you cer-tainly knew whose side he was on. You hoped it was yours.
Long ago, he was quoted as saying that genius was a little boy chasing a butterfly up a mountain. He later insisted that what he’d really said was that it was a butterfly chasing a little boy up a mountain (or a mountain chasing a butterfly up a little boy; I’ve forgotten which), and I think in some ways he was haunted by having caught his butterfly so early in the game. He never said this in so many words (to me, at any rate), but his fierce dedication to his writing, and his conviction that every word he put down was the best he could find, were signs of a man who dreaded ever hav-ing it said that he was slipping, or that he hadn’t given it his best. One time, at the behest of a son of mine at Exeter, he wrote a few paragraphs for the seventy-sixth anniversary edition of The Exonian; he called it “In Awe of Words,” and with the permission of the management I’ll reproduce it here, because as usual he says these things better for himself.
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